By Assistant Professor Teo Wei Peng, Physical Education & Sports Science (PESS) Academic Group

Social media the likes of Facebook and Instagram are not just a means to connect people, they are becoming powerful tools for educational communications in schools and classrooms.

Social media influencers with a strong following are afforded 😁 celebrity status, with large companies such as airlines, car-makers and hotel chains enlisting their services for brand and product promotions. Not only does social media provide affordable, innovative, and effective ways to communicate ideas, social media platforms often employ machine learning to predict and potentially influence behaviours by ‘pushing’ advertisements and newsfeeds of specific interest to target users.

The next time you access your Facebook or Instagram account, check if items that you have recently searched for on the internet are now seamlessly appearing on your social media feeds.

Social media even play a key role during political campaigns to expand a political party’s reach and influence beliefs, especially to the younger audience. Such is the reach of social media, for better or worse, that it has disrupted many traditional industries and is rapidly changing the way we interact with people, promote businesses, and disseminate information.

While there are still many questions about the effectiveness of using social media in an educational setting, it is undeniable that social media will play an ever-increasing significant role in how we teach and learning.

Social media is often seen as a double-edge sword in education, however there are many opportunities for mainstream education providers to leverage off the influence of social media, particularly in times of mass uncertainties such as the current COVID-19 😷 situation that is disrupting traditional face-to-face teaching. Social media offers a simple and engaging way to interact with students and the wider audience without the face-to-face element. It allows an educator to track how students choose to engage with the materials.

As an educator and a scientist, I initially struggled with the concept of using social media in mainstream scientific communication. I was uncomfortable, and often very selfconscious, about what to post, how to make it engaging or how to make my posts stand out. However, the more I engaged with social media, the more I realised that there was no right or wrong way to present information.

Here are three principles I have garnered based on my social media experience. Although these are for scientific communication, they should be useful for all communications in education:

1. No right or wrong wei (.. oops I meant way 😊): One of the first questions I asked myself was, “how do I start doing this?” Apart from issues of copyright (i.e. posting online other material that is not your work), personal data regulations and cyber-security. There is no wrong way of doing it. Every teacher has a unique style of teaching in the classroom. It is the same for social media. Some people will create elaborate storylines, while others will just present facts and figures. It comes down to your own preference on the approach, which will evolve eventually depending on the type of audience and what you are comfortable doing.
2. KISS 💋: Keep It Short and Simple. Most social media platforms have word or character limits to prevent lengthy posts. Even if you can publish a long post, most people who are on social media would just want short and condensed information. The aim of social media, and quite frankly the success of it, is that EVERYONE (yes, including the aunties and uncles in the wet markets!) can understand the content. As an example, infographics are often a very good way of delivering technical and lengthy pieces of information in a succinct and understandable manner.
3. Not to be REPLACED but to be EMBRACED: The goal of social media is to provide a complementary tool to existing pedagogical infrastructure or framework, and not to replace traditional modalities of teaching and learning. In fact, some fields of study, such as physical and human sciences, still require face-to-face teaching. However, we are now seeing an increased use of blended learning modalities to deliver classes online, with social media being used to reinforce learning outcomes offline or outside of the classroom.

The role that social media plays in our lives is ever-expanding and it is unlikely to lose momentum in the near future. While there are many uncertainties about the use of social media in the context of education, one thing for certain is that the usability of such online platforms will only improve. Considering that most of us are engaging with at least one social media platform, educators can leverage on this opportunity to optimise learning experiences at a scale not attainable by traditional teaching methods 🤞🏻.